START UP AND SCALE UP SALES MANAGEMENT

Seedcamp Sales Tales

Are you Happy with your Sales?

by Stephen Allott, Venture Partner Emeritus, Seedcamp.

Updated 26 November 2024

Seedcamp Sales Tales was inspired by Carlos Espinal from Seedcamp. He suggested I write a book book on Sales. So I have written this living book. It includes what I learnt growing Micromuse from 10 to 800 people and our NASDAQ IPO, what I learnt chairing 12 boards, what I learnt doing consulting for Redgate Software and for hundreds of other tech companies, what I learnt building the G-Cloud Digital Marketplace in Government Digital Service in the Cabinet Office into one of the largest online platforms in Europe and what I learnt working with the incredible Seedcamp portfolio and founders.

See me on stage giving my Building a World Class Tech Company speech at Trinity College, Cambridge University.

See my 7 minutes of unconventional wisdom at Sales Confidence

Come and see me in person in London.

VOLUME 1: WINNING YOUR FIRST CUSTOMERS

1. Seedcamp Sales Tales — the Blog Series
2. The first sale is the hardest — it’s a trial
3. Enterprise sales closing checklist and tactics. The 12 step programme
4. Your Customer Success team target is reference-ability
5. Lead me on — all sales start with a qualified lead. Go forth and educate — make it personal
6. The greatest sales deck ever by Andy Raskin
7. How to write a business case: ROI business case development using ROCE trees
8. Pricing issues (high or low, bundle or menu)
9. Handling legal contracts and T s & Cs,

VOLUME 2: BUILDING YOUR SALES ENGINE

1. Sales is a 3 Act Drama. How your Founder sales role evolves thru Search/Focus/Scale
2. You are selling not buying when sales hiring
3. The first sales hire is the hardest
4. Sales organisation expansion guide / Role and Territory design
5. Recruiting Sales Reps: Top Ten Tips to catch the best
6. USA market entry / when and how to open an office
7. Sales / Pre-sales / Implementation / Customer success: how they fit
8. How to sell to Government: its a different ball game

VOLUME 3: MAKING SALES A MEAN MACHINE

1. Using your weekly sales meeting to drive innovation / find the money
2. Make your sales forecast about action
3. Sales rep Onboarding and Training … talking to Tim Frankcom
4. Commission plan design / Monthly or quarterly targets?
5. Using channels and “partners”: when does it make sense?
6. How to Diagnose and Fix sales problems from Wayne Barker
7. How to win from within using a Champion inside by Alex Mackenzie
8. Competitor playbooks; how to win every time from Wayne Barker
9. Sales Stack from Sales Stack 2020

SEEDCAMP SALES TALES

The Series consists of 24 Sales Tales and has attracted over 16,500 views on Medium. Sales force commission plan design is the stand out most popular topic readers are interested in. Closing trials is next with 2300 views. Making the business case for purchase of your product comes next at 2000 views. And of course once they have bought and deployed, Customer Success at 1500 views is popular. The editor’s choice for the best thinking in Sales Tales, I think, is the 3 Act Drama explaining how the games changes through Search, Focus and Scale. My next favourite is the 8 factors for picking a focus market in “Lead me on”.

The highest completion rates for articles are an indication of the best quality work. Sales forecasting comes top with 50% of readers getting to the end of the article.

ARTICLE COMPLETION RATE

Customer Success and Business Case are also highly rated.

Please suggest any other topics you would like us to cover.

As a software CEO and Chairman, I have had to build, target, direct, motivate and repair sales teams of all sizes and types. They range from:

1. Redgate Software selling developer tools using digital and desk based sales to sell to the US and Europe from a building in Cambridge and growing from 10 to 300 people to
2. Micromuse (NASDAQ:MUSE) selling enterprise software in 20 countries and growing from 10 to 800 people down to
3. Start-ups and scale-ups I have chaired and advised.

The Micromuse logo

My management consulting firm, Trinamo, was flooded with work. When I asked if someone was happy with their sales and explained what we did, they wanted help. Wayne Barker worked for me at Micromuse and Trinamo.

The Seedcamp portfolio asks me more questions on Sales than any other function. It’s high impact to get sales right. In fact, sales is the business. Research shows that once you have product market fit, Sales is the biggest single performance lever. Recent workshops show that the top 3 topics are:

• Digital lead generation and customer case study webinars
• The transition from Founder led sales to the first sales hire
• Sales commission plan design

Survey by the author at Business of Software 2018

Sales covers not only 3 channels: digital, inside and field but sales management also covers 9 separate areas. I asked the audience at Business of Software which of these 27 topics they were most interested in and here are their choices which are strikingly consistent.

• Lead generation
• Designing an inside (desk based) sales team
• Sales process design
• Target and commission plan design

The Seedcamp team